De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

They've eventually been dragged kicking and screaming into doing this after years of the "Oh, we won't ship Qt or anything that even smells like it's been near KDE" basically for their own petty NIH reasons - something they were more than happy to accuse others of. Those of us who identified Qt as the right basis years ago are simply rolling our eyes.

So what was this Kubuntu thing about? This is not about "the right basis", but about "any basis". So far they've focused on building more-and-more user-friendly systems based on each "basis". Now they are starting to work on removing this "basis" barrier so that you can use applications with different toolkits in a single system consistently.